The importance of an integrated digital strategy in lead generation
How can marketing managers create a more integrated digital marketing strategy?
We have dived into specific topics over the last few weeks, such as CRO vs CXO, how to create a data-driven product strategy, and should you be using PPC if ranking number one on SERPs, but how do these all tie together?
Why is digital integration important now?
With so many workers around the world to remain at home, companies that previously relied on physical operations and events for lead generation have had to shift their service offering to customers in different ways; be that online or otherwise. Whether it be an IT Supplier or an Estate Agents, we have seen businesses really embrace digital and create more of an integrated online presence. Regular client service businesses that maintained relationships through physical meetings or business/networking events have had to continue nurturing relationships in much less physical ways, such as online calls or online instant messaging services, embracing digital technology.
Physical events and marketing opportunities have been canceled. People can't get face-to-face. With the world having to change so quickly to be completely digital, the need for digital and the opportunities for digital marketing over the last year have really come into their own.
What is an integrated digital strategy?
Digital marketing is key in most industries today, creating an integrated strategy and collating all areas of digital help to achieve a larger goal. An integrated digital strategy means creating consistency within brand and marketing activities online, aligning messaging at every customer touchpoint to increase conversion rates.
Where to start?
To start an integrated strategy you need to understand the why? By diving deep into your company’s proposition you can translate your business and user needs into requirements that shape digital projects to drive commercial growth for your organisation. Understanding your overarching vision and message is essential to creating the perfect integrated strategy. Crafting your message at the beginning stage will make the difference between a successful and unsuccessful strategy later down the road. When it comes to lead generation at this stage we find out where customers are dropping out of the journey and what is causing it, identifying customer pains and potential opportunities. By having the correct tracking and analytics in place you can informatively see where and what may have caused frustration, apprehension, or where blind spots are that you need to improve on.
A successful website is the backbone of your strategy, by having an area you can drive traffic to and nurture leads from. A website can enable or limit business growth depending on many factors such as how it facilitates navigation, or how easily it can be crawled by search engines, limiting or expanding reach. A website can be the hub to start the lead generation journey through paid search or SEO strategies to increase traffic. Choosing the correct way to capture leads on the site is another challenge depending on your audience, their needs, and where they have come from. Testing what resonates with your customers will come later when you optimise and develop your digital strategy further on an ongoing basis.
Continuous alignment with your customers
By aligning content, funnels, paid ads and CTA’s, etc. you can begin to see the benefits of an integrated marketing strategy, increasing campaign ROI, and business success as well as making sure your existing marketing strategies are not limiting you in areas such as SEM (search engine marketing). By aligning your purpose, web structure, and traffic generation you are creating a customer journey that can nurture and enable valuable MQL’s. Each business’s customer journey is different and often varies per customer segment, so there is no cookie-cutter approach. Finding the perfect combination of touchpoints for your target audience is all down to continued optimisation through data analysis and speaking to customers frequently.
Using Marketing Technology (MarTech) to track and optimise success is vital. Having all of the above areas in place is great but to grow and have a successful funnel/customer journey you need to constantly be testing and optimising, studying where conversions are dropping out and what causes it. CRO and CXO are both key to tailoring your strategy to your business. We have a great piece differentiating CXO and CRO here to help you work out which one you need to be prioritising.
Why an integrated digital strategy is important
There are three main areas that are improved by having an integrated digital strategy. Firstly, brand awareness, having multiple useful touch-points throughout the customer journey creates a much greater impact than when multiple campaigns are run in isolation. Secondly, your conversion rate. By integrating organic, paid, and MarTech solutions, your engagement rates will increase and begin to push leads down the funnel closer to conversion as your touch-points follow a narrative and the experience becomes more sticky. Thirdly, brand trust, SEO, and building brand authority online show consumers your legitimacy. Also, Hubspot found that B2B companies are getting 14% of their leads from SEO, which is in the top three lead generation sources, but businesses are only investing 12% of their budget into it showing there is room for improvement and to get ahead of the competition.
Overall you are improving your customer journey
By integrating your digital strategy you can see that you have improved and elongated your customer journey leaving you with high-quality leads which are ready to be converted either online or offline. See below for a high-level example of a B2B lead nurturing map after you have integrated your digital strategy and how the process allows you to nurture and generate leads before they end up with your sales team.
